- From: pat hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2003 18:17:33 -0800
- To: public-sws-ig@w3.org
Folks, it seems to me that there is altogether too much pessimism being expressed on this topic. The fact that 'cross-ontology reasoning' poses problems is undeniable, but ask yourself what the reason for it has been. If you take two people and tell them to formalize ontologies describing some domain, without communicating with one another, the chances are close to zero that they will produce formally compatible ontologies. Until now this has been the normal way to proceed, and the results have been predictable. But it seems to me that the advent of the semantic web, simply by placing ontologies on the WWWeb in public view, will in itself provide a practical cure. Already, the sane way to approach writing an ontology is to first check to see if there is one already written that you can use, perhaps with some modifications. If there is not, you write your own: but even then, if you find that you need a concept of, say, AUTHOR, then it is easy to check to see whether someone already has a suitable notion formalized, or even simply registered, and to use that one in your ontology also. The Dublin Core terminology is widely used for example and has thereby, from this wide use, acquired a formal meaning which one could not actually derive from the 'defining' ontology itself (which in this case consists of little more than a vocabulary with English comments): the very act of 're-using' a term in another ontology *in itself* adds to the global suite of formally described information about the concept. In this way, the SWeb can, I suggest, become a kind of evolving, growing global ontology representing a large-scale consensus, rather than a huge collection of independently written ontologies requiring constant human intervention to translate between them. This optimism depends of course on thinking that people will re-use concepts in this way. But the real reason for optimism is that there is no reason not to do this, and every reason to do it. Human language evolved because it is useful to be understood and to understand: the ability to communicate benefits both ends of the communication channel. So writers of ontological content for the SWeb, and users (readers) of that content, will all feel the economic pressure to re-use existing content as far as possible, so that they can be understood and can understand one another. All this pessimism seems to me to be like worrying that if people were all to invent their own language, communication would be very difficult. Which is true, but only relevant if there is any reason to think that people are likely to do that: and there isn't. Pat Hayes -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Friday, 19 December 2003 21:16:57 UTC